A Banquet of Consequences (55 page)

Good for you to get things off your chest. It’s healthy to blow off steam now and then.

Don’t apologise. No hard feelings. You must have a go at me when I’m out of order.

Alastair sounds like a perfect monster. How do you manage to put up with him?

I’m utterly amazed you remained married to Francis as long as you did.

But what happened after that?

Barbara looked up at Winston who said, “An’ there’s more, Barb. Practic’ly every time, she says something more or less supporting her, an’ she never points out that one time Caroline said this and the next time she said that and the third time she said something diff’rent. It’s like . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked, if anything, regretful.

Barbara finished his thought. “It’s like she was encouraging her to keep writing. Only thing is . . . why?”

“Well, there’s this to consider,” Winston told her. “It was what was on the memory stick, Barb.”

He moved the laptop to sit in front of him, and he accessed a folder that Barbara saw was named Internet/Adultery. It contained a list of documents. Nkata opened the first of them and turned the computer to face Barbara fully. Across the top of the screen in bold she saw “The Power of Anonymous Adultery.” Beneath this, Barbara read a few lines. She recognised at once that she was looking at the same introduction she’d seen in the folder in Rory Statham’s desk.

She went from this introduction to the table of contents, from there to the chapters themselves. She saw that indeed there was and had always been a book that Clare Abbott was writing, and it looked as if she had been well into it at the time of her death. She’d completed twelve chapters. She’d begun the thirteenth. From what Barbara could tell, they were strongly but simply written, perfectly accessible to the ordinary reader. But the fact of them on a memory stick only and the fact of that memory stick’s being hidden away in the boot of Clare’s car insisted upon a question being asked: Why the secrecy?

“Has to be she di’n’t want Caroline to know,” Winston said without hearing the question. “She print up chapters or she leave the chapters on the desktop, or the PC, Caroline sees them. And Clare di’n’t want that.”

“But if that’s the case,
what
the bloody hell was going on between them?”

“We’ve been thinking financial blackmail,” Nkata said, “an’ even job blackmail, but what if we’re lookin at summat else here, Barb? Here’s Clare goin round havin it off with married blokes while all the times she’s spoutin all her feminist beliefs. What if Caroline jus’
couldn’t cope with th’ whole hypocrisy thing? That’d be how she saw it, innit?”

Barbara thought about this. “So Clare’s being celebrated right, left, and centre for the Darcy book,” she said slowly. “Feminist of the century, a sisterhood with women, and all the trimmings. She has in the works another book to add to her reputation. More celebration set to come in the future. More champers by the bootful. More hoo-ha all round. She’s already done the proposal for it. Her publisher wants it. She’s probably signed some kind of contract. She’s sitting pretty.”

“Meantime, she’s also catting around Dorset and Somerset,” Nkata added, “bonking married blokes every which way to Sunday.”

“She’s betraying her sisters and all the rest. And now she’s going to write a book about this Internet adultery thing . . .”

“But no bloody way is she
about
to mention she’d removed her knickers as part of her research.”

Barbara nodded. “I can see how it would work, Win. Caroline can’t abide the whole two-faced part of it all. She tells her that if she publishes that book, the word goes out about her and her ‘fact-finding’ missions at the Wookey Hole Motel. Clare’s burnt toast if that happens. Great publicity on one hand. A ruined reputation as a feminist on the other.”

“So Caroline’s got all the power now. Over her writing. Over her reputation. Over everything, Barb. Who wouldn’t like that, in her position, eh?”

Barbara sighed and shook her head. “But bloody hell, Win. That puts
Clare
in the spotlight as the killer, not Caroline. Caroline’s got her job into eternity. She’s got Clare Abbott under her thumb. Why kill her, then?”

“Could be we got the answer in those interviews of her husband and her mum, Barb. Clare’s looking for something to unlock Caroline’s grip on her. You ask me, she found it. We work out what it is—”

“And we’ve got our motive. That has to be it. Clare needed something more explosive on Caroline than Caroline had on her.”

“She must’ve found it.”

“So she had to die before she let loose with what it was.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

Lynley didn’t allow himself to feel irritated at Isabelle’s requiring a daily report from him. He’d gone round her in acquiring this case for Barbara to work upon, and had he been in the superintendent’s position, he would have probably been as outraged as Isabelle herself had been. So rather than exacerbate matters by sending her the previous day’s details by impersonal email—which he would have frankly preferred as a time-saving manoeuvre—he went to her office. He reported what there was to report, making a point of going on at some length about the carefully hidden set of documents that DS Havers had managed to unearth, which were, even as he spoke, being carefully assessed by the sergeant herself and DS Nkata in Dorset.

Isabelle asked him what Winston Nkata had reported to him about Sergeant Havers’ behaviour in Shaftesbury. This surprised him. He said to her, “I don’t make that requirement of any officer, guv. If Barbara goes wrong, we’ll know of it eventually.”

“It’s the eventually that I worry about” was her reply. “Do get on with it, then. We’ll speak tomorrow.”

The abrupt dismissal told him she had things on her mind. He wanted to ask her what they were—pressure from above as to how she was using her manpower was always an issue—but he let the matter go. He had things on his mind as well, although very few of them had to do with the case in hand.

He hadn’t parted from Daidre as he would have liked on the night before. He’d found, for once, that a sleeping bag on the floor of her bedroom—there was hardly room for both of them on the camp bed and it was far too unstable anyway—had lacked both physical comfort and romantic appeal. So afterwards, lying side by side with a thin blanket of questionable provenance thrown over their lightly perspiring bodies, he’d asked a question he knew she wouldn’t like. When, he wondered, was she going to get round to completing the bedroom?

She chose to misunderstand him, which should have told him at once that this was territory best avoided. The flat had two bedrooms—this one and a very small one that she intended for a home office—and
she spoke about having to make some sort of decision about keeping or removing a plate rail that indicated its long-ago use as a dining room. Thus he knew she was avoiding the real issue: this bedroom in which they were forced to use the floor for their lovemaking if they didn’t wish to engage in a knee trembler.

Because he was tired, he said, “Daidre, you know which bedroom I’m talking about.”

She rose on one elbow. Her glasses were a few feet from where they lay, and she reached for them and put them on, the better to see him clearly. She said, “I suppose I do.”

He could tell from her voice that she was tired as well. More reason for postponing their conversation. But he didn’t want to and whether this was selfish of him or not, he found that he didn’t at the moment care. He said, “Should we talk about why you’re avoiding it? I ask because it seems logical to me that one would have provided adequate sleeping arrangements first when taking on a project of this size. Sleeping and bathing. The rest can wait.”

“I hadn’t thought much about it.” She rose to a sitting position, her arms around her legs and her cheek resting upon her knees. There was virtually no light in the room due to the window that had been painted an unappealing shade of blue by some previous owner without the means to purchase curtains for the place. Thus he could barely see her, which he didn’t like. He wanted to read her face. She said, “What I have at the moment is adequate and it seemed to me that the larger question is—”

“One of avoidance,” he finished for her.

There was a silence. In it, they both could hear Arlo lightly snoring from the next room. Dimly in the distance, too, the sound of a bus passing along Haverstock Hill came through the single pane of glass. She said, “What do you think I’m avoiding, exactly?”

“I think you’re avoiding me.”

“Does the last hour look like I’m avoiding you, Tommy?”

He touched her bare back. Her skin was cool and he wanted to put the blanket round her shoulders but he stopped himself. The gesture would be too fond, and he didn’t want fondness at the moment. He said, “On the surface, no. But there’s a sort of . . . I don’t know what
to call it . . . an intimacy, I suppose, that you find frightening, perhaps? Not physical intimacy, but the other. Something deeper that can exist between a man and a woman. And I think it’s represented by this bedroom.”

She was silent and he knew that she was pondering this, for that was exactly who she was and why he had been drawn to her from the first, even when he’d met her in Cornwall as broken as he had been at the time. She said, “I think it’s the guise of permanency that I’m avoiding.”

“Nothing is permanent, Daidre.”

“I know that. I did say
guise
. And then, of course, there’s the rest of it. Which is always there and always will be.”

At this, he lifted himself to a sitting position as well. He was suddenly aware of
feeling
naked, which was so much different than merely being naked. He reached for his shirt. He began to put it on. Oddly, it was a bit of a struggle and he put this down to the lack of lighting. He said, “Christ, Daidre. You can’t be thinking of . . . what shall I call it? An antiquated social gulf between us? We’re not living in the nineteenth century.”

She moved her head in a way that told him she would have cocked it had she not still been resting it upon her upraised knees. She said, “As it happens, I’m not thinking of that, the social thing. I’m thinking of the growing up thing and how that ‘thing’ moulds us from infancy to be who we are—standing here . . . or rather sitting here—as adults. We think we leave the past behind us, but it follows us round like a hungry dog.”

“So it
is
the social gulf thing,” he said, “at the bottom of it all.”

At this, she rose. In the corner of the room she had a chest of drawers and across this lay her dressing gown, which she donned. It was—like everything about her—practical, a serviceable garment of toweling material completely unlike something Helen would have worn. She said to him, “I think sometimes that you’ll never come close to understanding me.”

“That’s unfair,” he said. For he believed he did know the nature of her struggle and what forces within her held the world at bay. Taken away at thirteen years of age from the ramshackle caravan in which
she lived with her parents with her teeth loose and her hair falling out, she’d not even had the culture and traditions of a travelling community to provide her with a handhold in a world she had previously never been a part of. Rather, her father had been a solitary tin streamer, and the decrepit caravan the family called home had been positioned in various locations near riverbeds and creeks throughout Cornwall while he plied his marginal trade and his children—there were three—went largely ignored. They’d lacked the essentials—decent food, shelter, and clothing—but they’d also lacked the intangibles that form an infant into a child and a child into an adolescent becoming ready to step well rounded into the world. Her adoptive family had been loving, but in Daidre’s case the die had been cast and it was against the long-ago throw of it that she continued to struggle. Lynley understood this intellectually. It was emotionally that he had difficulty with it.

He, too, rose. He began putting on the rest of his clothing. He said, “No one can dive back into the past and make things different. That’s stating the obvious, I know. But my point is that to allow the past to become a rampart against the future—”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” she interrupted. “It’s not a case of doing at all. It’s a case of being. Tommy, it’s who I am. And there
is
a gulf. And it
isn’t
social. But it’s so deeply ingrained in each of us that there may well be no way to breach it.”

“I don’t want to think that.” He’d been holding his shoes. He set them on the floor.

“I know,” she said. “I think that’s why you keep coming round.”

“You could stop me. A word from you would do it. Well, a sentence, rather. I wouldn’t like it. I’d feel it deeply. But a single sentence could settle matters between us.”

She put her hands on the chest of drawers, as if she wished to keep herself across the room from him when her inclination was to come to him as he wished her to do, to stand before him so that he could do what he also wished, which was to take her into his arms. She said, “I’ve known that for a few months now. But the truth is, I’ve not been able to say it, that sentence.”

“I
am
in love with you, Daidre. You do know that,” he told her.

“Oh, I wish you weren’t. Or at least that you hadn’t said. You’re still much too vulnerable after Helen and—”

“That’s not the case.”

She rubbed her eyebrows. She pushed her glasses into a better position. She pressed her lips together and he could hear her swallow. In this as well she was so unlike Helen. As guarded as she was, there were moments when Daidre let her feelings escape, and this was one of them. She said, “There’s such equanimity in stasis, Tommy,” and he could tell from her voice that a tightness had come into her throat. It was one that he recognised, for he felt it as well, if for an entirely different reason.

“For you, perhaps,” he said in answer. “But not for me.”

Despite their conversation, they had not parted badly. At her door, they’d stepped easily into each other’s arms and wished each other a good night’s sleep. But he was still thinking of what had passed between them when he returned to his desk after his conversation with Isabelle. And when his phone rang, he did hope it was Daidre, although the words, “We’ve worked it out, sir. We’ve found the book. She was writing it; Caroline was trying to put a screw in it. Clare was looking for something to free herself of Caroline, and she found it” told him otherwise.